That Facebook Accidentally Removed Elizabeth Warren’s Ads Is the Point

Brian Feldman, writing for Intelligencer:

The company’s current moderation system is designed to operate in an environment where context, often implied or not easily discernible to an outsider, does not matter. […]

Understanding this is the key to understanding why Big Tech is something to be concerned about. Even when it’s assumed to be operating in good faith and attempting to be fair, Facebook still makes the wrong call.

This story from March is hardly news, but it’s interesting and important because it highlights one of Facebook’s moral dilemmas that don’t get as much much focus as their privacy-related transgressions.

Historically, Facebook has been criticized for their content moderation and censorship practices (these criticisms largely revolved around the poor mental health resources offered to their contracted content moderators, who are poorly paid and required to sort through the worst content humans try to upload to the internet). Facebook’s record here is so astonishingly poor that it’s plausible that a presidential candidate might’ve had their posts removed based on the content of their message rather than the fact that they technically broke on of Facebook’s rules (which, in this case, was completely irrelevant to the context in which such a rule should apply). I’m not saying this was an innocent mistake on Facebook’s part, I’m saying that this level of inconsistency is not only problematic on it’s own, but it offers plausible deniability in cases where Facebook truly does remove content based on the message it carries. Given Facebook’s ubiquity in the western world, this is a threat to the freedom of information in our society at large.